


When It All Comes Crashing Down

by Yaratree



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bittersweet, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Interrogator of Last Resort, Kylo Ren Redemption, M/M, Mind Reading, Not So Heartless Hux, Not So Unrequited Love, Or At Least He's Working On It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-10 13:43:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15950546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yaratree/pseuds/Yaratree
Summary: Butgod, did he burn to know; if he would learn one last thing before he probably never saw Ren again and spent the rest of his miserable life rotting in some godforsaken compound, it was this part of Ren he'd never seen before, and didn't understand but wanted to - the sea change, the new equilibrium, thegrief.Because it might not matter, and he knew that; but at the end of his line, maybe he could accept it mattered tohim.--Kylo Ren defects to the Resistance after Snoke's death and is asked to interrogate Armitage Hux.





	When It All Comes Crashing Down

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Tumblr prompt: _"I have means of extracting information from you."_
> 
> A story in which Hux has a lot of feelings he doesn't know how to deal with, Kylo Ren didn't sign up for this, and the Resistance has really found their legs since Crait. Or, an unbeta'd mess. 
> 
> Also, sorry for all the _emphases_ y'all, but Hux is high-key _stressed_.
> 
> Please kudo and comment! Tell me what you liked, what worked for you, and how it made you feel. :)

“You know I have means of extracting information from you,” Kylo Ren said from across the table. “And you know I can make it as agonizing as I need to.”

Hux smiled thinly. Yes, he was aware. He was also aware of how little he could do about it. He pulled subtly against the restraints binding his hands behind his chair, focusing himself with the simple pain in his wrists.

Waking in Resistance possession three days ago had been a nasty shock. Before that, it seemed he'd only just been persuaded to board Ren's shuttle on the _Finalizer_ , after which his memory had mysteriously shorted out. It hadn't taken long to fill in the missing pieces, though, as he'd really had not much else to do but seethe, refuse to give meaningful answers during round after round of questioning, and imagine how much other damage Ren had caused in his defection. 

Ren wasn’t a strategist, true, but neither was he stupid. The First Order was already unstable without Snoke, and he doubted he was the only asset Ren had compromised before he left. Rescue, Hux thought sourly, was a gratuitous dream. And the security he’d seen around him on the Resistance base looked to be disappointingly effective.

This left admittedly few things within his power to do, but stalling the inevitable – and by all accounts, excruciating – mental joyride Ren was about to take through his head might be one of them.

Another was to maintain some dignity by pretending he wasn’t nearly as afraid of this eventuality as he was. He tried to flick the loose hair out of his eyes handlessly, but it was a motion he wasn’t used to, and he had to make do with partial success.

“Where’s the benefit for you in this, Ren?” Hux asked, almost landing a conversational tone. “The Resistance can’t offer you anything. Nothing but rubbish and shame.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Nor am I going to ask you to try,” Ren said softly, seeming at ease as he reclined in his chair. He was swathed in traditional folds of some soft-looking brown fabric that suited him disgustingly well and his hair shone healthily in the overhead lights. It was the first time Hux had seen him since he’d knocked him out, and he hated that Ren could look so effortless and collected while Hux was scruffy, disheveled, and felt generally suboptimal in every way.

“But I do need information from you,” Ren went on, “in one way or another – the kinds of operational intel I wasn’t privy to. Out of respect for our, ah – previous professional relationship, I’m giving you one last chance to tell me willingly, or accept that I will take it from you.”

Hux did not let himself breathe faster, even as a new shot of adrenaline spiked his blood. Which was an idiotic reaction, he berated himself, when he already knew what Ren’s presence in this interrogation meant. He stole a glance at the holocam in the corner.

That he wasn’t stalling from cowardice in face of the pain, he felt relatively secure; although the fact that he found it helpful to reassure himself somewhat of this wasn’t overly heartening. But more than that – he was all too conscious of his weaknesses, as any commander ought to be, and the personal failing that would serve him worst now was his lack of mystical mind-powers. He knew he had no defense against Ren taking anything he wanted from him once he’d peeled open his mind.

And Hux knew he knew too much. He had a war-ending wealth of information in his head.

And he’d been out of options since Ren walked in the room.

“Which is it going to be?”

Hux swallowed, and stalled. _The last defense of the powerless and the craven_ , he thought bitterly. “Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why not try? I’m a captive audience, as it were. I won’t interrupt you.”

“How thoughtful.”

“Besides, wouldn’t proselytizing your newfound allegiance be the most effective way to get me to open up, honestly and completely?”

Ren tilted his head and studied him, eyes roving slowly over Hux’s face and the threadbare coat he’d been given to wear over an equally threadbare shirt. For just a moment, Hux felt a thrill of something akin to hope, which was _absurd_ , but then Ren shook his head.

“No, General. I don’t think a man like you can understand.”

“And what kind of man is that, to have so little scope of understanding?”

Ren seemed to consider his words. “You’re too cold,” he said after a moment, leaning forward to rest on the table. “Too ambitious, and focused. There’s no provision left in you for caring, for loving. You see only yourself and those you need to accomplish your goals, and everything else is collateral. I can’t say if you’ve ever loved anyone but, if you have, I think that love’s long since died.”

Irrational anger flushed through Hux as Ren talked, and he _knew_ it was irrational, and his annoyance at being affected only fed the fire. But for _Ren_ , of all people, to presume to know his heart and damn him for his _coldness_ –

“You know _nothing_ of me,” he hissed. Realizing he’d started toward him, Hux made himself relax back against the chair.

“Maybe I don’t,” Ren conceded with a half shrug, leaning back as well and folding his arms. “But I’d like to think I know a little, given how long we worked together.”

“And how did that work go, Ren? Did your self-absorption really leave you spare concern for anyone around you? You –” Hux drew in a sharp breath as he bit himself off, reminding himself he was trying _not_ to further antagonize the person who could decide to tear into him _sooner_ and _more painfully_ –

“As you say.” Ren inclined his head, thankfully unperturbed. “In the end, it doesn’t matter.”

Hux dropped his glare to the table and then, after a moment, closed his eyes, trying to get a handle on himself. His cheeks itched where his three-day beard was growing in, and he was acutely, _profoundly_ aware of his utter powerlessness to reshape the situation; and he silently, venomously cursed Ren – cursed the fact that they were having this _inane_ conversation, and that, ultimately, he could control nothing about having his mind imminently flayed. That, even once that was borne and done with and the Resistance had scooped out all they needed from him to undercut his life’s work in the First Order, they would doubtlessly sentence the rest of his life to be either quite short or forever imprisoned and fully disenfranchised. He pulled at his cuffs again, letting the metal bite harder into his wrists.

Ren was right. In the end what they assumed, what he wanted – it didn’t matter. It had never mattered.

He took a deep breath and looked up to find Ren watching him strangely.

In the space of that breath, in a flash of some deep and innate understanding, Hux saw _sorrow_ written across Ren’s face – in his brow and lips and tired jawline – and _grief_ around his eyes. Caught at the sight and suspended in the bloom of knowledge, his mouth parted; _why_ , he wondered, _what_ –  

Ren raised an eyebrow and Hux’s awareness landed abruptly back in the interrogation. The spell was broken; the expression was gone.

“Well?” Ren said.

Still searching Ren and trying to fit together his unexpected insight, but also keenly aware of needing something to stall with once more, Hux scrambled for a question. The one that came out was a little more genuine than he was intending to be. “What else did you do to the First Order when you left?”

“That’s not relevant to you. You’ll never see the inside of one of their ships again,” Ren said. “Make your choice.”

 _The hell with it_. “How long had you been planning to defect? What tipped the scales and made you leave?”

“That’s also irrelevant.”

Hux didn’t know why he _needed_ an answer, suddenly, even when knowing would accomplish nothing; but a spark had been lit within him that pushed some small part of the hopelessness aside, and when he was already guaranteed to lose everything and gain nothing, and had just seen _what_ –

“ _What_ could make you turn your back on everything you’d worked toward? How could you just pick up and flee to the other side of the war?”

“General, _decide_.”

“ _Damnit_ Ren, I want to know!”

Ren blinked, visibly taken aback, and Hux himself was a little surprised to find he was leaning in as far as his restraints would allow. But _god_ , did he burn to know; if he would learn one last thing before he probably never saw Ren again and spent the rest of his miserable life rotting in some godforsaken compound, it was this part of Ren he’d never seen before, and didn’t understand but _wanted_ to – the sea change, the new equilibrium, the _grief_.

Because it might not matter, really, and he _knew_ that; but at the end of his line, maybe he could accept it mattered to _him_.

With their eyes still locked in the taut silence that followed, Ren leaned forward again.

“I told you,” he said slowly, evenly. “I see no reason to explain when you won’t understand. _Knowing_ is another thing, and it’s not enough. Not enough for me to bare my soul to you.”

The spark guttered and died, and a seeping coldness replaced it in his chest. “And yet you’d strip mine bare with a few thoughts. Doesn’t your Resistance value _reciprocity?_ ”

“That’s not –” Ren scrunched his eyes shut and sighed. When he again leveled a look at Hux, his face was grim. “Am I to understand you choose not to share of your own will any First Order knowledge you may have?”

“I have no control over your _understanding_ ,” Hux spat, even as his heart began to hammer in his chest again. “Or, _apparently_ , my own.” _No, not yet –_

“Will you share it with me freely?”

“Ren –”

Ren’s chair screeched backward as he stood, towering over Hux. “ _Will you?_ ”

The second in which Hux glared up at him through his hair and a chill settled into his bones stretched and stretched and _stretched_ , and he frantically tried to calculate around an unbudging, unyielding Ren.

But he couldn’t – he knew him well enough to know he could be immovably stubborn, but not well enough to know how to break through it.

And he also knew stalling could only ever have been a temporary measure. And he would never, _never_ plead.

He ground his teeth. “No.”

A piercing look, and then Ren nodded. “Alright.”

Hux had just enough time for a shallow, open-mouthed breath before Ren reached out.

Stars filled his vision a split-second before he registered the skull-splitting pressure sending reverberations crashing through his head from all sides, viciously boring in his eyes, lashing at his temples, behind his ears, _everywhere_ , all through him, on planes of existence he didn’t know he occupied. A raw shout escaped him, though he was bodiless –

“Sorry,” he half-heard Ren murmur from so far away, and then the pressure decreased somewhat to a vicious grinding, enough for him to be aware that he was sagging in his chair - so much so he would have fallen out if not for his hands bound behind it. He was panting, gasping ragged breaths, and he still couldn’t draw enough air. The stars receded to a dancing, irregular pattern, and he could see Ren through them, still stretching a hand across the table, looking a little chagrined.

And then he was _remembering –_

_He was watching the sun rise from orbit on the bridge of his first command ship –_

_He was at lightspeed on the way to a new assignment, savoring a coffee and parsing a brief on his datapad –_

_He was walking the corridors on a half-finished Starkiller, digesting a report on the relative suitability of nearby stars –_

There was too much passing through his mind’s eye for him to register fully before being rushed on as Ren began to hone his search: moments and meetings and weeks-long assignments that he didn’t even know he remembered from his academy days and years of promotions and command. They took a split-second to recall in entirety, and as he knew them, Ren knew them; and he was drowning, caught up in all of the sensations and thoughts and feelings –

 _No,_ he thought desperately in some marginally saner corner of his mind, stringing thoughts together through the onslaught and fracturing pressure – _there has to be – something… can I? Socks and shoes_ … _could that work?_

He attempted to scramble some focus and suddenly remembered searching for his boots on some previously-forgotten morning, remembered how he had finally found the right one behind the bed and been unduly irritated, and he mentally latched on, clinging to the incredulity of how it could have ended up there.

The memory was tugged away from him a second later, and he reached for another, this time coming up with – _the beautiful dress shoes he’d been so proud of as a ten-year-old, and when he ruined them in the rain his father belted him until he couldn’t stand –_  

_The boots his father had favored through the years, from ground level; staring at them again and again, with a ringing head and a mouthful of blood and gasping for air –_

“Stop,” he heard Ren say distantly, but strangely, he thought absently, not unkindly. “Don’t fight me. You’re not made for this this, you can't filter...”

Reeling from the years of blows and abuse distilled into a few seconds, he let Ren guide his memories back to the First Order: _the cold hands of the silver-mustachioed instructor who fixed his too-small grip on a blaster; the Admiral’s evaluative frown as she stared down at him; the particular way an old commander lounged behind his desk as he eviscerated him –_

_Considering his lieutenant across his own desk –_

_Dismissing her as he entered a conference room to an intelligence meeting in full swing –_

The pressure shifted subtly through his head, as if Ren had caught a scent or found a thread and _pulled_ –

Endless briefings aboard the Finalizer welled up within him, one after another – _asset readiness and troop distribution, operations reports and special ops assignments, high-profile donors, supply contracts, revised timelines, long-term expansions plans, intelligence networks –_

_Charts and maps and report after report after report –_

_No_ , he thought again, panicking, pushing, pulling, _no no no no, –_  he cast about, and his mind picked up a thread from earlier –  

_He was lying unmoving, watching his father’s boots walk away and realizing his mother hadn’t died from a fall –_

He recoiled, but couldn’t escape the horror and the fury unleased in him anew, again, for the first time –  

_Her hand on his head, on his back, her broken, bloodied body –_

“Hux, _stop,_ ” Ren's voice echoed from somewhere _away_ , outside the stream of his mind, but it was all too much – he could no more stem the torrent of memories than wield the Force. But Ren’s voice plucked a string in his mind –

_Ren on Starkiller in the snow, covered in blood, and he felt such desperation and gut-wrenching fear –_

_Being incensed at Ren’s pointless destruction, at being challenged and belittled on his own ship –_

_Ren’s face across a metal table, poignant and sorrowful –_

_Seeing Ren alone in the mess and without his mask for the first time, and staring at each other, because how could someone so dangerous and petulant have such an open face and soft lips and soulful eyes, and he was caught –_

_Dropping a glance to Ren’s lips as he passed him maskless again, and he couldn’t stop it; he cared about him, he knew, deeply and inopportunely, and it_ didn’t matter _, his anger was more useful anyway –_

 _Toe to toe with Ren just off the bridge – he’d been half in love with him for years and the unfamiliar longing had only grown, shoved aside for practicality but not forgotten: to know, to_ be _known, to comfort, to touch –_

The abrupt release of pressure in his head left Hux weightless, boneless; he realized he was gasping in his chair and drenched with sweat. He felt like every emotion he’d ever experienced had just been shoved through his brain at lightspeed, and they all still clung to him, rushing through his veins. He was reeling, he was humiliated, and he was _exhausted._

Laboriously, he opened his eyes to see Ren kneeling beside him, lowering an arm. They stared at each other in silence, one panting, one wide-eyed.

Hux’s brain felt like pulp, his thoughts molasses. He tried to recall which and how many memories had flooded through him, and for once the First Order was not foremost in his thoughts. But he was so fuzzy, and his head tingled with some strange, intense kind of heady relief; he couldn’t begin separating any one from another. 

His father’s face rose before his mind. That Ren had experienced with him god-knew how much of the degrading farce that was his childhood – fine. That was fine. It hardly mattered anymore.

But coldness bloomed in his stomach as he realized Ren had seen himself, seen raw things Hux had played so close to the vest, for propriety, for his career, for fear. Ren had felt all that he felt, all that he’d wanted and thought –

The realization washed over him but remained swirling like so much jetsam in his mind, just beyond true comprehension. He became aware he couldn’t find the first of words, not even in his head.

After a few seconds, Ren rose to perch on the edge of the table.

His eyebrows were drawn together as he watched him, his expression intense, haunted. He opened his mouth and drew in a breath to speak; then shut it. Instead, he reached out a hand and gently cupped Hux’s cheek.

Hux’s stomach clenched as something moved, eased, deep within him –

He knew Ren _knew_ no one had touched him so tenderly since he was five years old.

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Ren’s as he turned unconsciously into his hand.

Ren brought his other hand up to brush away the damp hair on his forehead. Then he leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on his lips.

His lips were warm and soft, and Hux’s breathing hitched and his heart was in his throat; but, exhausted as he was, it took him a long, long second to react, to catch Ren’s lips in his own –

But then Ren was pulling away. “You should have said something sooner,” he said quietly, searching his face. “Or I should have.” He was still close enough to see individual dark eyelashes and the ring of green at the center of his eyes. “We had _years_ , but I always thought...”

The grief in his eyes was back, and deep, as Ren drank him in.

Yes, it mattered to him, Hux knew viscerally in a place deeper than thought, as his heart pounded and something threatened to escape his chest. Somehow, when it all came crashing down, it mattered more than anything else.

And, amazingly, it mattered to _Ren_.

He wanted to - he didn't know what, but Ren was right there, and Hux _wanted_.

But his brain was short-circuiting, and his eyelids drooped as they became heavier and heavier. Ren frowned and, with one last touch to his cheek, stood. “You’re going to need to sleep for a while,” he said looking down at him. “But it was because of love, you know. What you asked. Familial love, fraternal – and regret as, without Snoke, I began to realize all the suffering I’d caused. And, I wanted to _be_ loved.” A heart-wrenching not-quite smile at Hux, and then he turned and began making his way toward the door. Hux stared wordlessly after him. “And I couldn’t… Even with all my resentments, it became clear I couldn’t conscience the First Order. And I didn’t want to scar my soul any more by pretending to myself that I could.”

Ren hesitated with a hand at the door release and looked back at Hux. For the space of several breaths as he stood suspended in motion, his eyes were wretched.

“Hux, I...” and Hux’s breath caught again as Ren stared at him desperately.

Eventually, almost too quietly to hear, Ren whispered, “I wish things were different.”

Then he pressed open the door, and Hux wanted to raise protest, to ask him not to leave, to ask what he meant; but his mind was too sluggish to form the words. He heard the door hiss shut, and felt his head drop to his chest, and knew no more.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments of one or one hundred words greatly appreciated! Please, pretty please :)
> 
> (And if you're interested: [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9-XgED9stM) is the particular piece I couldn't get out of my head as I fiddled (again and again) with the ending. If you're not up for a 15-minute Schubert movement, my favorite two iterations are back-to-back and start at 4:45.)


End file.
